Residents of Trinity Bellwoods woke up to a few unorthodox mayoral campaign signs on Monday morning, touting candidates who would “just smoke pot as mayor, not crack” and publicly urinate but “never get caught on camera.”

The joke campaign signs are the product of No Ford Nation, a Toronto group using videos and placards to highlight its issues with Mayor Rob Ford’s leadership and conduct.

Councillor Doug Ford, the mayor’s campaign manager, described the signs as an attempt of playing “dirty” in the campaign. “If that’s the only way they want to try to defeat him, good luck,” he said at city hall. “People are smarter than that out there.”

“We’re hoping we bring ‘em in with humour and keep ‘em with facts,” said Christina Robins, the 41-year-old writer behind the group, “and give [people] something to think about.”

The signs in Trinity Bellwoods show three joke candidates: Jeff McElroy, who promises to only smoke marijuana in office, not crack; Ray Faranzi, who says he will just get publicly drunk instead of doing so while threatening to kill people; and Jim Tomkins, who says he doesn’t get caught on camera when he publicly urinates.

The signs were apparently removed early on Monday afternoon.

This is the group’s second project; the first was a three-part video series released Friday, which used Family Guy-style animation and real audio from well-known Ford scrums to portray him as a “cartoon character.”

The projects are collaborations between No Ford Nation and communications company Rethink Media. Robins said Caleb Goodman from Rethink approached her at the beginning of the election campaign, asking if she wanted to take NoFordNation to “the next level,” and presented her with the idea for the videos.

Robins said there will likely be more initiatives from the group before the October 27 election.

Her group started as a small Facebook page in 2011, after council started talking about a KPMG report outlining a host of potential service cutbacks for the city.

“I don’t want to live in a city where feeding children is a ‘nice to have,’” she said, “I want to live in a city where feeding children is a priority.”

Robins started the page as “Stop Ford from Destroying our City,” jokingly noting that “I was quite upset when I started typing,” and later renamed it to No Ford Nation. She wanted it to be a place where people could come to get resources they needed for deputations, and for writing to their city councillors.

“I wanted to make it really easy…to make informed decisions,” she said.

Now her website lists other mayoral candidates and what their platforms are, to help inform visitors. While the website’s slogan is “anyone but Ford,” Robins said she still wants voters to understand the platforms of other candidates instead of blindly voting just to get Ford out of office.

“All we’re trying to say is, this is the most important election that we’ve had probably since amalgamation,” she said. “And the next four years of this city will determine the next 40 or 50. We need to make an informed choice.”